Childless Chiding

When I was in high school, and even into my first few years of college, if you had asked I would have told you that I would be married by 25 and had my first child by 28. This insured time enough for my husband and I to have some “us” time. I couldn’t have told you where I would be living or what my job would be or anything other than marital and kid type things, but it somehow felt like a plan.

I’m not 65. I’m not born of the era where marriage was not an option so much as a required destination. I wasn’t anti-feminism, clucking my tongue at all the “poor misguided women” who forsook their intended roles at nurturer and matron to play at being men. Quite the opposite in fact. I was studying journalism and was just beginning to consider going abroad. 

These two identities, globetrotting me and baby soothing me, co-existed but never flushed out into a singular plan. They ran like the Rio Negra and Amazon River – parallel but never mixing. I never wondered if my husband would be willing to follow me across oceans to see what we found there, or if having a child might interfere with those plans.

I also never earnestly thought about having children. Not really. 

When I told people my plan for marriage and kids I was repeating a script that I’d been prepped for my entire life. Everything around me told me that was what people did. My parents were the picture of marital templates (still are) married with two daughters, just like everything around me said they were supposed to be, supposed to do. Sitcoms showcased variations on that same theme. No one ever asked me if I wanted to get married or if I wanted children; generally it was assumed that I would do both and the questions were simply when and how. 

I never questioned that path for myself. I carved out a space next to the things my soul was leading me to and assumed those parallel lives would reconcile themselves. Only they didn’t for me. They didn’t reconcile, not because a woman can’t do all of those things, they didn’t reconcile because this woman didn’t want to do all of those things. At some point in my last two years of university I realized something about myself…I didn’t want kids. 

It was revelatory!

I didn't want kids and there wasn't any particular reason. I like to borrow them - kids with a return policy are my favorite type. People see me playing peekaboo with a child on a bus or nuzzling the neck of a little chubby thing and that is enough for me. I like sleeping in. I sometimes have sleep for dinner. My patience varies. All of those things are true but not a reason...THE reason I don't want kids. I just don't.

All of a sudden my life plan opened up differently. All of a sudden the blank spaces and question marks had space to ferment on their own without a biological clock ticking softly in the background. I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want kids. My personal reproductive inclination had just presented me with a gift. But if realizing I didn’t want children was a gift to my understanding of myself and what I wanted in life, it was also a curse for all the people who presumed what I should want in my life.

My parents were easy. They never pushed me one way or the other. They wanted me to be a strong and self-reliant woman. My realization about children didn’t impact that in any way and so they didn’t have much to say. They simply encouraged my dreams as they always had.

But, oh, the outside world…

In my 20s, people assumed I was simply young and strong headed. “You’ll change your mind.” They’d smile knowingly at me, their voices thick with condescension. Then, as I got older and began to travel more, living stretches of time in other countries, people warned me that I better stay still so that I could find a husband and get pregnant before I was too old – before it was too late. 

“I can find my husband anywhere and I don’t want children,” my standard response, inspired the same stream of headshakers, tongue cluckers, and assertions that “you’ll see”, “you’ll change your mind.”

There were those that called me selfish. I could never tell if the selfishness is because I wasn’t going to give my everything to a tiny squalling – albeit cute and amazing – genetic spinoff and they were; or if it was because I wasn’t doing my part to increase the already exploding population. One person explained it as selfish because I’m “well educated” and have “strong values” and so it was my duty…my duty to share that with a new generation. 

There have been glimmers of openness and acceptance. Over the years my favorite example of understanding my perspective came from a boyfriend.

“Why do you want kids?” I countered.

He didn’t answer me and I assumed he, like everyone else, assumed me crazy or selfish or a few years shy of changing my mind. But hours later he circled back to the conversation and my questions to him. It was immediately evident that he’d been thinking deeply about it.

“I recognize that I want kids for a myriad of reason,” he started. “Part of it is culture and expectation. Part of it is who I am in my family and the family obligation related to all of those other things I mentioned.” He was thoughtfully silent for a few moments and then he added, earnestly and without any condescension at all, “Even so, I still want kids.”

Somehow, in his analysis of his own motivations related to kids he was able to understand mine. He was able to accept that his motivations were his and had no bearing on my own – and in doing so he ceased to judge. He acknowledged that despite all of the pressure his world exerted on him he still had a personal desire to reproduce. He just did. And I just didn't.

My desire to be childless is not an indictment on those who desire otherwise. The idea of family is at once personal and public but it doesn’t have to be divisive and I don’t have to change my mind.